How to Fossick for Gold: Nine Techniques Explained, With Video

Where to start

There is a right order to learn these in, and it is not the order people usually try.

Start with a pan, even if you came for a detectorA pan is the only tool that tells you whether ground carries gold at all. Ten pans in a gully will teach you more about where the heavy material collects than a week of swinging a coil over the wrong flat. It is also the cheapest mistake you will ever make.

Learn to read one gully properly before you move onGold moves like any other heavy thing in moving water: it drops where the water slows. Inside bends, behind boulders, the upstream side of a bedrock bar, the bottom of a crevice. Work one gully until you can predict where the black sand shows up, and every gully after it gets easier.

Add volume or add coverage, not bothA hand sluice processes far more material than a pan in the same hour, which is what you want on ground you already know pays. A detector covers far more ground, which is what you want when you are still looking. Decide which problem you actually have.

Match the technique to the problem you haveMore material through the box? Sluice. More ground covered? Detector. Bedrock you cannot reach from the bank? Get in the water. Nothing but a hunch and an afternoon? Walk the old workings and look down.

The nine techniques

What each one actually is, the kit it needs, how to do it, the mistake that costs beginners the most gold, and a video worth watching before you try it.

Technique 1 of 9

Gold panning

Start here

Washing a couple of kilos of dirt at a time in a shallow pan until only the heaviest material is left. It is the slowest way to move material and the fastest way to find out whether ground carries gold at all.

Best for: Testing ground, chasing a lead upstream, and cleaning up what every other method produces
Kit: A pan, a classifier, a scoop and something to hold the concentrates
Finds: Fine gold, small pickers, and the information that tells you whether to keep working a spot

Fill the pan about two thirds and submerge it. Break up every clay lump with your fingers, because clay holds fine gold and floats it straight out.
Shake side to side under water so the heavy material works down to the bottom. This is the step people rush, and it is the step that matters.
Tilt the pan slightly away from you and let the top layer wash off in small pulses, re-levelling and re-shaking every few passes.
Work down to a spoonful of black sand. Do not chase the last of it in the field; keep the concentrates and finish them at home.

The mistake to avoidWashing too fast. Fine gold leaves the pan with the light material long before you see it go, and you never know what you lost.

The Ultimate Beginners Gold Panning Method!Vo-Gus Prospecting on YouTube

Technique 2 of 9

Specking

Free, and better than it sounds

Walking slowly and looking. No machine, no water, no digging: just picking up gold that is already sitting on the surface where erosion has exposed it.

Best for: After heavy rain, in quartz reef country, on old workings and freshly cut tracks, when the sun is low
Kit: Your eyes, and a container you will not lose. A hand lens and a magnet help.
Finds: Surface specimens, quartz with gold showing, and the occasional very good day

Go after rain, when runoff has washed the dust off the surface material.
Work with the sun low and behind you, early or late. Flat midday light hides everything.
Walk slowly over the right ground: quartz reef country, old mullock heaps, the edges of sluiced flats, freshly cut tracks.
Look for shape and weight, not shine. Gold is dull when it is dirty, and the shiny thing is almost always mica.

The mistake to avoidLooking for a glint. Mica and quartz sparkle, gold usually does not, and beginners spend the whole walk picking up the wrong thing.

Chasing the Gold They Missed | Prospecting the Abandoned GroundVo-Gus Prospecting on YouTube

Technique 3 of 9

Crevicing

Patient and productive

Cleaning out the cracks in exposed bedrock. Gold has been washing into those cracks and settling for a very long time, so a crevice is a natural riffle that has been trapping for centuries.

Best for: Exposed bedrock in gullies and creek beds, especially once the water has dropped
Kit: A crevice tool, a screwdriver, a spoon, a stiff brush and a pan
Finds: Coarse and fine gold that has concentrated itself in one place over a very long time

Find exposed bedrock where water has been forced to slow: the upstream side of a bar, the inside of a bend, the bottom of a chute.
Open the crack and clean it out properly with a tool that fits, then brush the sides.
Take the material right down to the bottom of the crevice, including the fine clay. That layer is where the gold sits.
Pan what you take out on the spot so you know whether the bedrock is worth following.

The mistake to avoidStopping at the gravel and leaving the fine clay at the bottom of the crack. That is the part that carries the gold.

Scraping out a Bedrock crevice and finding gold flakes!The Sluicers on YouTube

Technique 4 of 9

Hand sluicing

Easy to run, easy to run badly

A box with riffles that you set in flowing water and feed by hand. The current does the washing a pan would do, so you process far more material in the same hour.

Best for: Ground you already know carries gold, where a pan is simply too slow
Kit: An unpowered sluice, a classifier, a shovel and a bucket
Finds: Everything a pan finds, faster, plus the small pieces a pan tends to lose

Set the box in flowing water at a shallow downstream angle so material moves without racing. Too steep and the gold leaves with the gravel.
Check the flow before you feed it: you want the riffles to churn and clear, not to pack solid and not to scour.
Classify your material first. Feeding unscreened dirt with rocks in it wastes half the box.
Feed slowly and evenly. A sluice fed in dumps loses gold on every dump.
Clean up before the riffles load. A packed box stops trapping, and everything after that runs straight through.

The mistake to avoidChasing throughput. Twice the dirt through a badly set box recovers less gold than half the dirt through a good one.

Complete guide to setting up and running a sluice box for the best gold recovery.Two Toes on YouTube

Technique 5 of 9

Metal detecting

Where most Australian gold comes from now

Sweeping a coil over the ground and listening for the signal a piece of metal returns. On the old goldfields it reaches the gold the original miners could not see, because it works below the surface and they mostly could not.

Best for: Covering ground, working old workings and tailings, and finding what earlier miners walked over
Kit: A detector suited to gold, a pick, a scoop and headphones
Finds: Nuggets from sub-gram upwards, plus a great deal of rubbish on the way

Ground balance properly on the ground you are standing on, and re-balance when the soil changes. Australian goldfields are heavily mineralised and a badly balanced machine is deaf.
Swing low and slow, keeping the coil close to the ground and overlapping every pass. Speed is the most common way to walk straight over a nugget.
Dig every repeatable signal for your first few outings. You cannot learn to read a machine by skipping the signals you have decided are rubbish.
Work the ground the old-timers disturbed: mullock heaps, sluiced flats, the edges of old workings. They took what they could see and reach.
Grid your ground and mark what you have covered, or you will re-walk the same twenty metres all day.

The mistake to avoidSwinging fast and high, and only digging loud signals. The faint, repeatable, deep signal is the one worth having.

Find Gold Nuggets Fast: Metal Detecting Tips & Tricks!Ask Jeff Williams on YouTube

Technique 6 of 9

Sniping

Visual, and you get wet

Getting in the water with a mask and snorkel and working the bedrock by eye, submerged. You float face-down over the bottom and go into the cracks you can actually see, rather than guessing at them from the bank.

Best for: Clear, shallow, slow-moving water over exposed bedrock, in the warmer months when the river is low
Kit: Mask and snorkel, a wetsuit, a crevice tool, a snuffer bottle, gloves and a small pry bar
Finds: Coarse gold and nuggets sitting in bedrock cracks that a pan on the bank would never reach

Pick clear, slow, shallow water with bedrock exposed. Visibility is the whole technique: if you cannot see the bottom, you cannot snipe.
Float face-down and read the bedrock. You want cracks running across the current, because they trap gold exactly the way riffles in a sluice do.
Fan the light sand away with your hand until you reach the packed material down in the crack.
Open the crack with a crevice tool and work right to the bottom of it, the same as you would on dry bedrock.
Suck each piece up with the snuffer bottle the moment you see it, before the current moves it or your own silt hides it.

The mistake to avoidWorking murky or fast water. Sniping is a visual technique, and you cannot pick up gold you have already stirred into a cloud.

How To Snipe For Gold! (Underwater Mining)PioneerPauly on YouTube

Technique 7 of 9

Dry blowing

Arid country only

Separating gold with moving air instead of water. Dry material is fed into an airflow, the light dust blows away and the heavy material drops. It exists because most of the Australian goldfields have no water to pan with.

Best for: The arid goldfields of Western Australia and the Northern Territory
Kit: A dry blower or a shaker screen, and genuinely dry material
Finds: Nuggets and coarse gold in country where panning is not an option

Dig and screen. Anything larger than about a centimetre is worth checking by eye and discarding.
Make sure the material is properly dry. Damp dirt clumps, and clumps carry gold straight off the end.
Feed a thin, steady stream into the airflow. The lighter material blows away and the heavies drop.
Work the concentrate by eye, or with a magnet and a pan later if you have water.

The mistake to avoidFeeding material that is not dry enough. It is the single reason most dry blowing sessions recover nothing.

What Are Dry Blowers? | COMPLETE PROSPECTINGComplete Prospecting on YouTube

Technique 8 of 9

Highbanking

A powered sluice

A sluice fed by a petrol pump rather than by the current, so it can run away from the water. You shovel into a hopper, the pump supplies the flow, and the box does the same job a hand sluice does at several times the rate.

Best for: Working volume on a bench or a terrace that a hand sluice cannot reach
Kit: A highbanker, a pump, fuel, hose, a shovel and a classifier
Finds: The same gold a sluice finds, from a lot more material

Set the box level side to side and at a shallow downstream angle, exactly as you would a hand sluice.
Set the pump flow before you feed anything. The riffles should churn and clear rather than pack or scour.
Classify and feed steadily. A hopper loaded in dumps surges the box and loses gold on every surge.
Recirculating from a tub rather than drawing straight from a creek keeps the whole setup self-contained.

The mistake to avoidTreating the pump as the important part. The angle and the feed rate decide what you recover; the pump only supplies water.

The Art of Finding GOLD! Highbanker - Gold Prospecting Tips and Tricks!Colorado Gold Camp on YouTube

Technique 9 of 9

Suction dredging

Specialised equipment

An underwater vacuum. A petrol engine drives a pump that pulls gravel off the streambed through a hose and up into a floating sluice, where the gold is caught the same way a hand sluice catches it.

Best for: Reaching bedrock under deep gravel in a river, which no hand method can do
Kit: A dredge with floats, engine, pump and hose, plus dive gear
Finds: Gold trapped on bedrock beneath gravel too deep to move by hand

The nozzle does the digging. Material goes up the hose to a sluice floating at the surface, and the tailings wash out behind it.
The operator is usually underwater on a hookah air line, working the nozzle along bedrock cracks by feel and by eye.
Everything else is a sluice: the recovery depends on the box angle, the flow and how evenly material arrives.
It is heavy, expensive equipment and it is not a technique anyone starts with.

The mistake to avoidAssuming it is a shortcut. A dredge moves far more material than a hand method and finds nothing at all on ground that never carried gold.

How a Suction Gold Dredge Works. Discussing suction efficiency.Utmost Outdoors on YouTube

Frequently asked questions

Which fossicking technique should a beginner start with?

A pan, even if you bought a detector first. A pan is the only tool that tells you whether ground carries gold at all, and ten pans in one gully teaches you more about where heavy material collects than a week of swinging a coil over the wrong flat. Once you can predict where the black sand shows up, every other technique gets easier, and you will have wasted far less time.

Why am I not finding any gold in my pan?

Usually one of three things. You are washing too fast, so fine gold leaves with the light material before you ever see it. You are not breaking up the clay, which holds gold and floats it straight out of the pan. Or the ground simply does not carry gold, which is exactly what panning is for finding out. Work more slowly, break every lump with your fingers, and keep the black sand rather than chasing the last flake in the field.

Do I need a metal detector to find gold in Australia?

Most Australian gold found today does come off the end of a detector, and on the old goldfields it is how people reach the pieces the original miners could not see. But a detector does not tell you where to stand. Panning and crevicing find and confirm ground; detecting covers it. Plenty of people run both, and the ones who only detect tend to spend a lot of time on ground that never carried gold in the first place.

What is the difference between panning, sluicing and crevicing?

They do different jobs. A pan processes a couple of kilos at a time and is a testing tool. A hand sluice processes far more material in the same hour and is what you use on ground you already know pays. Crevicing is not a processing method at all: it is going after gold that has already concentrated itself in cracks in bedrock over a very long time, which you then pan. Most productive days use two of the three.

What is sniping, and how is it different from crevicing?

They are the same idea in different places. Crevicing is cleaning gold out of cracks in exposed bedrock you can reach from dry land. Sniping is doing it underwater: you put on a mask and snorkel, float face-down over the bottom, and work the cracks you can actually see down there, sucking each piece up with a snuffer bottle before the current moves it. Sniping reaches bedrock that never dries out, which is exactly why gold is still sitting in it.

How much does it cost to get started?

Less than most people expect. Specking costs nothing but time. A pan, a classifier and a snuffer bottle is the cheapest real kit in the hobby and will find gold on ground that carries it. A hand sluice is the next step up, and a detector is the big one. Buy in that order and you will learn to read ground before you spend serious money, which is the part that actually decides whether you find anything.

Keep reading

Where to fossick, state by stateThe public districts each state is known for, when to go, and what has been found.Gold prospecting clubs by stateThe fastest way to learn any of this is next to someone who already does it.

The technique is the easy part. The ground is not.

Every technique here needs ground worth working. Detector Maps puts historic gold workings, terrain and LiDAR hillshade on one map across Australia, and it keeps working when the phone signal stops.

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Fossicking techniques Australia · Detector Maps

How to fossick for gold: nine techniques, explained